ZW 2008 Day 5: Mythology
Disclaimer: I own nothing recognizable.
Read this with the Southern Raiders in mind.
Currents
Summary: Korra remembers very few of the stories Katara used to tell her in the early years of her waterbending, but she remembers the one that could make a weeping wreck of the greatest waterbender in the world. It doesn't seem like the best bedtime story, but Korra's time is drawing closed, and somehow she doesn't think this is the sort of story that should be forgotten.
"Tell me a story, Gran Gran."
Korra brushes her wrinkled hand across her granddaughter's forehead. "Promise you'll go to sleep after?"
Mako snorts in his armchair across the room, and Korra can't decide whether he's laughing at her or his snoring is getting worse. Aujaq giggles. "Promise."
"This is a story Master Katara told me a long time ago."
"Your waterbending teacher?"
Korra nods and makes a point to slouch and hobble into bed next to Aujaq. "It's even older than me."
Aujaq makes a face. "I'm pretty sure Gramp Gramp is the only thing older than you."
The Gramp Gramp in question lifts one bushy, white eyebrow at Korra, but the gold eye beneath shimmers with amusement. Korra chuckles. "This story is even older than Gramp Gramp. It tells us how the Poles were created." She closes her eyes, reaching into her memory for every detail, the way Katara told it. "A long time ago, the world was at war, and a waterbender hated a firebender."
"This doesn't sound like a very good story, Gran Gran." Aujaq has never had any qualms about speaking her mind before, and she's not about to start now. Korra suddenly has a great appreciation for Katara's patience. She's told Aujaq is very much her granddaughter. She rolls her eyes and shushes the girl.
"A long time ago, a waterbender hated a firebender."
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She was strong and graceful, a mover of oceans and a bringer of rain. She was the storm.
He was fierce and lithe, dancing through the night with flames licking his steel blades. He was the fire.
She was rough, then smooth in an instant, violent one moment and peacemaker the next. She was the ocean.
He was noble, turned to raging warrior in a moment, silent, still, and suddenly bright and consuming. He was the sun.
She was blue. He was red. She hated him.
He stood for everything she fought, in everything from his haughty bearing to his hungry ambition, and he would betray her trust to feed himself. The firebender sought glory and honor at whatever cost, even if it meant the destruction of the world. His fire would spread and he would let it race across a desert dried of hope and dead from despair.
Except suddenly he comes to her, humbled. His eyes, once sharp and gleaming as steel have dulled to the glow of the hearth. He carries his weight with straight shoulders and a bowed head, as if to say that he still has some pride, or dignity, but he will no longer be proud. At the time, she maintains there's no difference. Her voice, once warm like the ocean caressing the beach, breaks like ice as she condemns him.
All ice must either melt or shatter, and the waterbender does some of both (mostly shatters). The Avatar comes, as is his duty, to make peace between the waterbender and the firebender, to no avail. He loves the waterbender, and he can't bear to break her because pieces glued together aren't the same as a whole. The trouble, of course, is that water constantly changes, and the water he had adored was already frozen away whether he saw it or not. The healer in her knows broken bones heal stronger, but the mediator in him knows sometimes it's better not to break the bone in the first place. In this case, the bone is rotting from the inside, and she turns away from the Avatar. She turns to the firebender and he lets her break (her bones, her being, whatever is necessary).
They go to the man who infected her, who taught her hatred in the first place. Her ice shatters around the villain and melts into the firebender, and somehow she becomes mostly water again, healed but no longer perfect. As the Avatar predicted.
She returns changed, water again instead of ice. But she's not the same water as before, more the ocean than the koi pond the Avatar knew. No longer the cool stream but now a boiling lake, heated by too much contact with the firebender she used to hate. It breaks the Avatar's heart, though it takes him many years to realize it. His cool water scalds him and he won't let go but so help him, he can't let go.
He came to make peace, and peace there will be. The waterbender boils in the presence of fire and the firebender fizzles near water, and the only way to stop it is to separate them, so the Avatar fights his battles and keeps the waterbender at his side. It works. Water cools and fire warms again, and there is no spitting or sputtering or noise for a time.
It doesn't take them long to find each other. They fit together like yin and yang, circling like Tui and La. Together, they become something entirely different from what they were apart, but they change as the Avatar feared, and the world can't have that. There must be peace, and if peace can only come from steadiness, so be it. There is no sacrifice too great. (Is there?)
The Avatar tears them apart, separating their persons and their elements, and now between them there's a gulf too large for floods to fill and a forest too great for fire to burn. Eventually, the two pass on, but their elements can never embrace again. The storms rage and howl, the fires crack and scorch, always burning and breaking and screaming. Sometimes one breaks through, but the fire is too great and the water spread too thin or the rain falls too strong and the flickering flames are too small, and the one puts out the other. And thus fire and water can never touch and come away the same as before.
The fire that warms the ocean can no longer touch it, and ice crystallizes where waves used to roll. Waterbenders congregate there first to practice their art and then to settle, but still the place is cold. Ice. Sun shines on it, sometimes, but it's a harsh light that cuts through the air and reflects off the mountains of frozen, glittering water. This chill begins at the ends of the world, the poles, and grows until it reaches land, never to be warm again.
That is why the ocean is cold.
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"Gran Gran? I'm pretty sure the ocean is cold because of currents and the depth of the water."
Korra sighs. The young have no appreciation for mythology.
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AN: Well, I failed to write this in a timely manner, so I apologize to anyone waiting on me. I had a beginning that I scrapped because this suddenly came to me and made the first plan look lame (we can't have that). So, happy Day 1 of Zutara Week 2016, the day on which I finally get another day of 2008 churned out. Oh well.
Let me know what you think. The ideas were there but this was inexplicably hard to write, so I'm very curious about glaring flaws. Too many mixed metaphors?
Also, Aujaq, for those interested, is an Inuit name meaning "summer".
